Meet the new Ted DeSalvatore!

Sometimes, when I get bored, I reminisce about the mayoral election of two years ago. It was fun, what with Ted DeSalvatore being a candidate. He was always good for a chuckle, or failing that, a few hours spent tearing out your hair.

"Unicow," I would say to myself, "what you need is another crazy person running for mayor to lift your spirits."

Well, that's what we have now. The new, not-very-improved Ted DeSalvatore comes to us in the form of one of the original DeSalvatore's harshest critics, Rachel Rosenfeld.

Here's an article from the Sentinel: Fitchburg blogger "Really Rachel" running for mayor.

Those of you who were paying attention to such things back in 2007 may remember that I was loosely allied with Rachel, in the sense that we both thought DeSalvatore was scary dangerous. Because he was.

I'll go into the whole story at some point, but let's just say that we're not allied anymore.

Rachel was pretty nutty even when we were on the same side, but since that time she's gone way over the deep end. I suspect she's probably been reading the WingNutDaily too much or something.

Anyway, it's still morning and I'm tired and haven't sharpened my teeth just yet, so I'll just mention a couple of things.

First, Rachel doesn't have a chance in hell of winning. She at least seems to recognize this on some level. Fitchburg may have its flaws, but DeSalvatore's stunning defeat proved that voting for certifiable lunatics isn't one of them.

Anybody who actually reads Rachel's blog can see pretty much instantly that she's just an old crank with a personal grudge against Wong. That's not a platform.

Second, there was one hilarious little quote in the S&E article:

Rosenfeld, an independent voter who said she plans to register as a Republican, said she would like to set up debates with Wong during the campaigns. She said she does not believe partisanship will play a large role in the race, but expressed her belief that Wong is too extreme in her liberal approach.

"There's a group of progressives in this city that are really, really nasty because they don't believe in free speech, and Lisa Wong is in that group," she said.

What's awesome about this is that you can replace "Rosenfeld" with "DeSalvatore" and discover that the two are almost identical in their thinking.

Here's an old quote from DeSalvatore, for comparison:

DeSalvatore said "information terrorists" called his supporters and spread negative information about him.

"As long as that ultra-liberal sense continues we don't have a chance," he said. "Without a prevailing common sense, the city is done."

And here's another from Rachel:

"(Wong) is a bright young girl, but she's got no common sense," Rosenfeld said.

So we have the focus on meaningless "common sense," the demonization of liberals, the paranoid fantasies about some shadowy cabal that's either out to stifle free speech or spread lies, and even the "independent" who spouts nothing but Republican talking points most of the time.

I can only conclude that Rachel Rosenfeld is actually Ted DeSalvatore 2.0 1.5.

This should be entertaining.